Persuaded by desperate US demands that Europe not rely entirely on deep in debt US military to protect themselves, England has built and is now launching to big, fat aircraft carriers. This is foolish: Navy’s Big Weakness: Our Aircraft Carriers Are (Expensive) Defenseless Sitting Ducks since WWII. The Japanese showed clear as crystal how one can stop these ships. The Kamikaze attacks can now be done with robots. During WWII, Russia showed how effective mass missile attacks can be with the Katyusha Rocket Launcher. The US and England, once global naval powers, are in steep decline these days and this is due to various forces especially running deeper and deeper in the red in trade while running government deficits. This one-two punch is fatal for any military empire striving to be a global power. Yet the US and UK leaders still pretend they are all-powerful and can do as they please no matter what. So both have decided to launch the beginning of WWIII with Russia.

I am totally pissed off about that. Russia is no longer weak and since we attacked all the much weaker allies of Russia in the Middle East, all we did was hatch a batch of violent jihads aimed squarely at destroying US/UK power in the Middle East including overthrowing the Saudi Royals. Meanwhile, Putin is picking up very powerful, fully solvent allies with the main one being China, one of the biggest nations and biggest manufacturing giant in the world. Here is a recent missile exercise in Russia:

Over-Designed, Extremely Expensive Military Equipment Is Destroying Our Nation because the guys running the Pentagon are joining in with the remaining industrialists to loot the Treasury, not protect us. Our politicians all do gross over-extenstion of our military reach due to international bribes pouring into Congress and to Presidents to spend our precious capital and lives defending horrible regimes abroad or trade rivals who are, like the Japanese, destroying our home economy.

The Globe is the first of five ships ordered in a $700m contract by the Chinese company from South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries.

It rides very shallow in the oceans and can go into shallow water ports unlike the Norwegian ships that are right now the biggest carriers. So three times more ports are available to this new ship and we can predict clearly with an easy mind that the entire Chinese fleet will be this sort of ship in another 20 years. Even more efficiently, since they ride easy on the water, they do travel a bit slower but more importantly, use a fraction of the diesel fuel the Norwegian ships consume so the price per square cubic of space for goods is cheaper. No naval power lasts much longer than its merchant marine and the US and UK have a very, very weak or nonexistent merchant marine. Nearly all the ships bearing down into US/UK ports are foreign operated and foreign owned.

Flag competition
40. UK shipowners were not unique in facing this myriad of problems and, unsurprisingly, a market response developed – in the form of the open register or ‘flag of convenience’. Over the last few decades a wide range of such shipping registers has developed and these now compete internationally for business by offering low cost and ‘user-friendly’ registration and fiscal environments for shipping companies. Many UK shipowners have elected to take advantage of these open registers.

41. In other cases, British companies have sought specific tax or financing advantages available in another country which have conditions attached which either require ship registration in that country or are otherwise not compatible with registration in the UK.

42. The effect of all of this has been steadily to erode UK owned, registered and crewed shipping.

The crews and often captains of these now-under foreign flag ships to avoid taxes and regulations are all foreigners. The home base population gets nearly zero employment or development benefits from this sort of shipping. Instead, the ships work internationally and are designed to make the ports in the US and UK poorer and weaker, not richer and stronger.

Britain once ruled the Seven Seas. Now, it barely holds its own to tin pot islands with crew rowing boats. The number of officers trained to command and run ships is collapsing in the last 18 years by an astonishing 50%. The graph shows this loss leveling off which is wishful thinking. It will collapse to near zero. Many civilian ship captains started off in the navy. The social and cultural beliefs and attitudes and self-disicplines of a naval ethos will vanish rapidly and this is happening to the US, too.

A few countries own the bulk of the fleet. About 54 per cent of world tonnage (measured by carrying capacity or “deadweight tonnage”, dwt) is controlled by owners (shipping companies) in Japan (16.0), Greece (15.3), Germany (9.5), China (8.4) and Norway (4.5).

In July 2009 the global merchant fleet consisted of a total of 53,005 vessels, made up of 31 per cent traditional general cargo ships, 27 per cent tankers, 15 per cent bulk carriers, 13 per cent passenger liners, 9 per cent container ships, and 5 per cent other vessels. In terms of carrying capacity in dwt, however, the great variation in ship sizes gives quite a different picture. From this perspective tankers and bulk carriers each account for 35 per cent, container ships 14 per cent, general cargo ships 9 per cent and passenger liners less than 1 per cent. In all, the global merchant fleet has a capacity of just under 1192 million dwt. >

Niether the US nor the UK own this. Note how our EU allies own much of this with China and Japan being the other two big powers. Japan, by far, the most. All aimed at destroying the industrial and financial base of the EU and US. Greece carries everyone else’s production having virtually none at home. But Japan carries Japanese goods. As does China. Even the Norway shipping is carrying goods produced mainly elsewhere. We have to remember this very important distinction in shipping.

The huge aircraft carrier launched by Britain has precious little protection. Note the near-50% decline in 20 years in naval capacity.

The bottom line is that the RN needs hulls in the water and for example 6 “technically advanced” Type 45 destroyers cannot do as much as 12 “obsolete” Type 42 destroyers due to simple physics – a vessel cannot be in two places at once!

I will simply include here for historical purposes, a comment written by a British naval officer:

Stephen Rolfe September 11, 2011
REPLY →

Its almost difficult to convey the sorrow that many people have in seeing how tragically the Royal Navy has been run down over the last couple of decades.

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Obviously during peactime you do expect some reductions over a long peaceful time frame………but what has happened in particular during the last decade is almost beyond comprehension. The last time i thought the Royal Navy had a pretty good balance was around the beginning of the nineties.

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After the Falklands war, the goverment of the day learnt a lot of lessons, and the defence budget was increased. Warship orders were increased, classes of frigates and destroyers were improved with upgrade weapons systems, such as CIWS……….but alas since 1990, its been pretty much downhill for the Royal Navy.

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The government of the 90’s seemed to start the ball rolling in the decline of the RN, with delays in replacement Warship programmes such as nuclear subs, which would have an impact later as many of the skills for creating these vessels were lost.

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BUT…to me the most disastrous period for the Royal Navy was under the previous Labour goverment…….Gordon Brown as treasurer just didnt understand defence one bit, and blatantly would not fund the armed forces year after year, which has led to the huge deficit the MOD now has.

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Put it this way how many surface combatants and submarines entered service during 2000-2010…….very, very few indeed and these had been ordered during the previous Conservative goverment of the 90’s. The FSC project was constantly stopped and started, and its only now that we are starting to design a new frigate some 10 years late.

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Type 45 Destroyer great vessel, but only 6 off………….and where are the Harpoons and Tomahawks. The class i think should of least of been 8 off, to ensure a reasonable number are at sea while others are being refitted or having maintenance. Alas i dont think any more of these vessels will ever be ordered. I cant get my head around the idiots who say.. yeah, we dont need more Type 45’s as they are far more capable than the Type 42’s……….true but as anyone with a bit of commonsense knows a ship can only be in one place at anyone time and doesnt have the speed of an aircraft to reach an area where it could be potentially required in a miniscule amount of time.

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The Carrier programme……..well Mr Brown did eventually get around to ordering these after many delays, and particular as they were to ensure thousands of Scottish jobs………..but alas the goverment didnt seem prepared to give the designers the money to allow for these vessels to have protection with either armour plating or weapons systems such as SAM or CIWS.

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Frigates…..the backbone of the RN, througout my life there has always been a constant stream of new classes of Frigates designed and constructed for the RN, and each year new Frigates would enter the fleet…upto the Type 23 that was.

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What i could never understand was why the Labour goverment didnt keep building these comparatively cheap vessels during the 2000’s while they were supposed to of been designing the FSC. In fact they did even worse than this, they held a defence review in 2004, in which amongst other things it was decided to sell 3 perfectly capable Type 23 Frigates which had years of operational service left in them.

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Talking of surface ships, i couldnt believe that the goverment was prepared to send sailors out on ships with their armanent removed such was the case with the Type 42’s with their SeaDart missiles. If i was a sailor i wouldnt feel uncomfortable serving on a warship knowing that it was severely underarmed.

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I find it unbelievable that during the boom years of the early to mid 2000’s, when other goverment dept’s were getting huge increases, that the defence budget was barely increased……if it had been so, then we would of had a more capable Navy today, and not be in the mess we are now in. Unfortunately the damage has been done………..i was hoping that the Coalition goverment would ring fence defence, but as they have said, no money whatsoever was left in the pot from the previous goverment. I understand that difficult decisions have had to of been made, but yet again i think defence has suffered more than was necceassy.

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The RN has got so low in numbers now, that there just can’t be any further reductions. I dont agree with scapping of the ‘Ark Royal’ plus all the Harriers. The carrier plus a squadron of Harriers with trained pilots should of been kept in reserve for emergencies at least.

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The Type 22 Frigates, excellent ships……….why scrap them, i was aboard one of these vessels last year during Navy days and it was in excellent shape, an extremely well armed vessel (a rarity on a RN vessel these days). As these vessels are being retired, how about the MOD placing the Harpoons on the new Darings, as they are now available, plus the Goalkeeper systems can be used as well on other vessels.

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By 2020 we will have a modern, very small fleet, and hopefully the countries finances we be in a better shape around 2015 for the goverment to keep both aircraft carriers, and hopefully a reasonable number of new Type 26’s will be ordered…..anything less just doesnt bear thinking about.

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In conclusion, these are my general thoughts. What is it about defence, that politicians dont get, yet everyone else seems to? Defence is the insurance policy of a nation, yes its expensive and we all complain about paying insurances in our lives…..but by god are we grateful that we have it when an unforeseen event has happened.

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Defence is an easy target for politicians to reduce as the hardware are visible assets and easy to dispose of……………yet in other goverment dept’s, cuts are difficult as there is nothing tangible to be seen to make cuts, as its mostly administration, which is hidden away in the network of computers.

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Why does the Coalition goverment say they have to spend only 2% on defence, as recommended by NATO…………surely we could spend a bit more.

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Why is it that other countries in the world are building up their navies such as in Asia, to protect their rights….while we are not.

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We are an island nation, we need a well balanced navy with sufficient ships to safeguard our future.
There are so many conflicts in the world at the moment, that our few ships are sailing relentlessly around the world doing their tasks of military support and humanitarium aid.

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Another misguided point, is that politicains say we dont need a strong Navy as we are not at war……….but they seem to miss the mind knumbing bleedin obvious that you can only fight a war with what you’ve got, and we aint got much much. It takes at least a decade to design and construct a warship with its complicated electronic and weapons systems………….gone are the days such as ww2 when a hull could be launched with just a few guns on it in such a short time.

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The main point is that we as a country seem to of gotten into this mindset that we can only spend so much on defence, when in reality this is not the case. We are a very well off nation, and it would only take the goverment to take a few tenths of a % of other goverment depts budgets, and then reallocated to defence for our country to have a strong, well balanced forces to safeguard our future interests, in which turn would create many jobs for people, leading to future engineering innovations.

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All it needs is a stronger goverment to make it clear as to what and where where this countries future aspirations are.
In the past we have just been see-sawing from one goverment to another, underfunding our forces, which has lead to short term savings but long term huge costs.

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A country safeguards its future by being strong, weakness encourages other countries to take opportunities. Look at the Falklands conflict as an example.

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Politicians need to look further than their own personal agenda’s, by not spending more on defence, as they think it would leed to less voters keeping them in power.

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I could go on forever with writing this postt, but i’am getting depresssed!

Funny, this retired naval officer mentions the Falkland war. It was the last hurrah for Britain. WWIII, on the other hand, will be immensely violent when the missiles are launched and those who want to win will shoot first so this hair trigger situation benefits anyone who has huge land masses rather than tiny islands that won’t much survive even six nuclear missile hits.

We have to remind ourselves that WWIII can happen any minute and under any circumstance which is why sabre rattling and lying about the course of events (say, the propaganda accusing Russia of starting the Ukraine mess, for example) can launch this deadly, perhaps final war. England can’t win WWIII under any circumstances. England already lost around 1954. Since then, WWIII has been impossible for Britain. The US used to have some grounds of thinking we could ‘win’ in a horrible way, this war but that was thrown out the window some time ago. Now, we have allies who are all very weak or are outright wrecking our economic systems or they are tiny and easily terminated. Russia and China can both concentrate their nuclear arms on the US after reminding Japan and Europe of their possible total annihilation by eliminating all the major capital cities in about a one hour time span.

Actually, Europe will cease the warmongering long before the first missile launches leaving the US and Japan to fight Russia and China alone. Another point forgotten by the US and Japan: China has 100 MILLION extra males. Out of a population of over a billion, they have enough extra males to field one of the world’s biggest land armies and sea navies and can lose all of them with little effect on the economy or systems.

The US has absolutely NO excess male population versus female population. We do have millions of ‘useless males’ who would have been working in factories who now are mainly in the criminal class or prison or working to control the criminal class or service the prisons. This immense wasteland of male energy is nearly useless for the military since it would more likely either revolt or at least destroy US facilities and equipment rather than fight Russian and Chinese who are dropping thousands of missiles a minute on them.

One last comment from the Brits and their colonies:

Published in ‘The Australian’ June 24
In Britain bent on National suicide? By Hal G. P. Colebatch A Government call to be “proud” of Britain’s Foreign Aid Budget makes no sense in a straitened economy.
It was deeply depressing to read of a senior British Minister, International Development Secretary Andrew Mitchell, claiming that lavish foreign aid was making Britain something called a “development superpower” and claiming that voters should take the same pride in it as they do in their armed forces. Britain’s Tory-led government has decided to increase foreign aid spending by 34%, that is, to about $24 billion. Mitchell claimed that this spending was achieving “brilliant” results and making Britain admired round the world – has anyone noticed cheering mobs waving Union Jacks (or at least non-burning ones) in Dar-Es-Salam or Johannesburg lately? One wonders if there is not some kind of impulse for national suicide at work in Westminster. He claimed: “My ambition is that over the next four years people will come to think across our country – in all parts of it – of Britain’s fantastic development work around the poorest parts of the world with the same pride and satisfaction that they see in some of our great institutions like the Armed Forces and the monarchy. This is brilliant work that Britain is doing.

” This includes $600 million a year to India which, as Tory MP Phillip Davies pointed out, is spending billions on defence, and has its own space programme. It has a navy with about twice as many ships as Britain, and a booming economy, and probably has more nuclear weapons. For Britain to subsidise the Indian space programme etc. is simply crazy. It won’t even buy the Tories domestic popularity, which Prime Minister Cameron may be aiming for, rather, emphatically, the reverse: the right-wing mass-circulation Daily Mail is polling nearly 9 to 1 against it.

As for claiming the British people should take the same pride in aid donations as they do in their armed forces, that is one of those statements from which men die politically – or at least it is possible to hope so. Britain’s near-Belgium-sized Navy and Air Force have become sad jokes (The Falkland Islands, for example, are defended by just four planes). One coroner’s enquiry after another has blamed the deaths of British soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan on skimped and inadequate equipment, and it now appears Britain is in danger of being sucked into a third war in Libya with under-equipped troops.

Meanwhile, with all the feeble violence of a demented sheep, the Archbishop of Canterbury has waded in, claiming that, “With remarkable speed, we are being committed to radical, long-term policies for which no one voted.” This is all too true, but of course, it is not defence he is talking about. He wants more monery spent of social services. So by roing-fencing foreign aid against cuts at the expense of defence the Tories haven’t succeeded in shedding the “Nasty party” image at all. Their utterly disgusting display of abject political cowardice has achieved nothing. The press is reporting deaths from cold and malnutrition among British pensioners, and walking through parts of some British cities it is not difficult to believe this, however picture post-card some other parts may look.

Har. The ‘foreign aid’ scam is a Bilderberg bribery scheme. This doesn’t help ANYONE except rulers of various weak nations. It makes the FIFA bribes look like spare change.

IN my opinion, a big part of the problem is the religious nut cases who think WW3 is a prelude to the Rapture. This is the Big Event where all of God’s children get to bail out of the Huge Sh@tstorm that’s about happen here on Planet Earth by going up to heaven. All us sinners get to suffer the consequences. I’m not seeing a lot of compassion going on in this scenario.

Hmm. Those heat-wave killed Indians – all 1800 at last count- don’t appear to think the roasting to death joke is very funny.

Just to make you think a little Elaine- why don’t you think about how many times you have heard idiot GOP politicians scream and yell and “debate” this issue. And then think about how many times have heard an actual climate scientist like James Hanson go public and make detailed explanations of climate phenomena.

The GOP propaganda wing is successfully drowning out the voices of real scientists. GOP climate ignoramuses have about 1,000 times more air time than the actual climate scientists who are working in this field.

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ELAINE: Solution: air conditioners. Freezing me to death won’t save them. Destroying modern civilization which is what the extreme global warmists want, won’t stop India from being hot. It was pretty hot even during the Ice Ages except where the glaciers are in the extreme north mountains.

Those Katyusha “missiles” you are referring to are not really missiles.

The Katyusha rocket, nicknamed Stalin’s Organ, was a product of difficult manufacturing conditions after the Nazis invaded the USSR. The Russkies were able to transport large sections of the Soviet industrial base from the eastern industrial regions to the regions beyond the Ural mountains. Unfortunately, some of the manufacturing standards had to be lowered to get everything back in production.

One problem was the the manufacture of artillery shells. The Russians were producing a lot of artillery shells that were not in spec range and so would not fly as accurately. The solution was to remove the out-of-spec shells from the line and install them on simple rockets which would be fired on mobile barrage launchers.

The Nazis feared the scream of Stalin’s Organs, knowing that the screaming primitive rockets would soon be falling everywhere and obliterating everything in their path.

Of course, this was following by powerful columns of T-34 tanks which were employed for deep penetration of the German positions.

I just call this nonsense shadow boxing in the never-ending war arena where we create the problems we now have to fund to fight.

But the real issue is that the citizens are being robbed through taxation and austerity regime to make this possible.

We will all wake up screaming one way or another.

The middle class around the world is the sacrificial lamb to a slaughter. If they don’t get picked off by their regimes, they will be robbed and plundered by the more desperate lower classes. In the end, we are just easy pickings, my friends.

“The US used to have some grounds of thinking we could ‘win’ in a horrible way, this war but that was thrown out the window some time ago.” US elites still do. It’s a funny thing about aircraft carriers. In only ONE scenario are they vulnerable, VERY vulnerable: when a shooting war starts. US elites are very confident that, with Mutually Assured Destruction(MAD), there won’t be a nuke war. This is why they continue to goad Russia and China into a military conflict. US elites are confident that neither China NOR Russia have the guts to start launching missiles. Of course, once the missiles start flying, EVERY SINGLE aircraft carrier is going to sink to the bottom of the deep blue sea. At which time, US elites are either going to be in their “safe” bunkers or on their way to them. Are US elites wrong? Of course they are! US elites are a bunch of overindulged, overly inbred idiots, mostly uber spoiled rotten rich kids who would homeless and unemployed without powerful connections. These are folks who think they are an elite; the elite of the elite; the best of the best. Look, Destined for World Rulership. George W. Bush got to be President(!). And Dennis Hastert is one of the most “honorable” members of Congress to have served in Congress in the last 30-40 years. What does that tell you?

In US military jargon – Rockets are unguided. Whereas missiles are guided.

There aren’t many rockets in the inventory though the USAF & others use a 2.75 inch folding fin rocket meaning the fins were folded so the thing could fit into the launcher tube. They employed a variety of warheads from anti-personel to starting fires to anti-(light) armour. As I remember they were hazardous to the load crews as they were notoriously easy to set off perhaps even the static electricity in the wrong socks could do that as I remember being briefed. Then again that’s why the airplane was grounded when parked and the ground wire connected. But with the advent of…computers and cheap (GPS) guidance modules built into warheads, who needs rockets these days??

Suicide fliers no longer have a job, though. Those little computer modules have gotten much cheaper even since 2001. Largely thanks to the ‘smartphone’ business — mass production has brought the price down and improved the quality…

What simply couldn’t be done at all in WWII, and was very expensive in 2001, is now an every day thing anyone can afford. Little toy helicopters with cameras for surveillance. Missile guidance systems can run in a tiny chip smaller than a fingernail, powered by a button battery.

And taking out an aircraft carrier is simply a matter of using larger rocket engines and throwing a bigger wad of explosives with it. The brain that guides the missile can still be microscopic.

The carriers like to think they have countermeasures, in which they make electrical/radio noise, or set off bright fireworks, or fill the air with a hail of bullets, or send missiles in the other direction. But the truth is that it is much much easier to build the big missile than it is to protect the HMS Sitting Duckie 😉